Sunfish, Funfish
Your Tuesday Twenty Pictures.
“Centrarchidae, better known as sunfishes or centrarchids, is a family of freshwater ray-finned fish belonging to the order Centrarchiformes, native only to North America,” says Wikipedia. “There are eight universally included genera within the centrarchid family…”—yada, yada, yada; all I know is, they’s purdy.
As you can see, sunfish rep all kinds of colors and patterns. Some of that is different species: bluegills, redears, pumpkin seeds, green sunfish, longears, etc. …but, honestly—Maybe they camouflage to their surroundings?—every specimen looks different from every other specimen. That’s the pleasure of pulling them out of the water. Anglers fetishize size: one’s “PB”—personal best—always earns the most huzzahs on social media. But my personal Personal Best are the purdiest one. Those yellows, oranges, greens, browns! All no bigger than my hand.
Sunfish overlap considerably with a category anglers call “panfish.” The definition is gustatory, not Linnean: “of the size to fit in a pan.” All these, I think, were too small for that, so you need not mourn. They ended up back in the drink (Lake Tanglewood, Lake Wildwood, the Chicago River, some body of water of a forgotten name in Arkansas where I road-tripped with my buddies for the eclipse last year), not inside the Rickipedian.
Sometimes, they’re so translucent you can almost see through them.
Some sunfish look like suns.
Some are as almost as stripy as tigers.
“There’s sort of a blue-green, and a green-blue,” Mrs. Rickipedian, a wiz at matters chromological, observes of this one:
Okay. Enough words. Let’s get fishical. Fishical. Fishical. Let you see their bodies rock.
As long as there are no loud boys in peddleboats disrupting the waters of Tanglewood. 😁
Fun! I've never seen these before, despite a childhood where I fished nearly weekly with my dad. They seem to be a Midwest/Mississippi River basin thing, not seen much west of the Rockies.
We had the native California Golden Trout (the state fish, only found in high Sierra lakes above treeline), brook trout, rainbow trout, and German brown trout that had been introduced. And suckerfish, which were trash and always thrown back. We always had a few dozen trout packed into the back of the freezer. I came to regard trout as poverty food -- right down there with beans and weenies, or fried spam and eggs, the stuff Mom made for dinner when the month ran longer than the money.
The trout were pretty (especially the Goldens and rainbows), but not pretty like these. These look like some kind of high-end aquarium fish you'd see in a doctor's office waiting room, not something you'd pull out of a muddy Midwestern river.